Merge feature for duplicate records/sources

LegacyUser

Jeff_Luke said: Hi -

I would like to propose adding the capability to merge records/sources.

I often come across duplicate records for the same event. It seems to be very frequent for marriage records in the US around 1900 or so.

Some records have more info than others, or may have images linked to them, but they refer to the same event. It creates a lot of clutter on the source views.

It would be nice to merge them into one source, keeping the superset of any details or images.

Here's an example of someone with 4 marriage records for the same event attached as sources:

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/per...

Thanks for considering!

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Each one of those four is a different source. I can have as many as nine sources for a single marriage event.

Not all are for the marriage (something that FamilySearch has not resolved), but are for events related to the upcoming marriage, such as affidavits (permission to marry), marriage banns/licenses (no return for the actual marriage). In addition, the indexes created at the courthouse are also sources. The nine sources does not count any IGI records (you have one of those among the four), nor does it count a new index created by the court house to replace the original which is usually well-worn and tattered.

Since these are historical records (that are found by the FamilySearch index), they cannot be merged without destroying the integrity of the historical record.